Radiohead.

For more than a decade, they’ve been a band on the cutting edge of music, or at least of music marketing.

So what do they do to give their new CD/LP/download product the splashy promotion they believe it deserves?

They come out with that most modern of media products.

A newspaper.

Specifically, a 12-page tabloid, handed out for free in select major cities, including this one. Online reports say copies went fast in many of these pass-out spots. (Last I heard, you could get one at Sonic Boom Records in Ballard, but only while supplies last.)

This sign of newsprint’s continued attention-grabbing viability comes two years and two weeks after the last print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Yes, I still mourn it.

I even dream about it. But I won’t get into that.

I will say I still believe there’s a P-I sized hole in the local media landscape. PubliCola, Seattle PostGlobe, Crosscut, and now SportsPress Northwest only fill pieces of that hole.

The SeattlePI.com website not only doesn’t fill its former parent journal’s role, it doesn’t even fill the role it could fill, as the go-to online local headline source.

It’s still designed like a newspaper’s web presence. The front page, and the second-tier directory pages, are each cluttered with 100 or more links, mostly to syndicated and wire pieces and to the contributions of unpaid bloggers. There’s no direct way to find the site’s own staff-written material (which remains remarkably good).

What’s worse, PI.com, as it’s currently structured, has little growth potential. It’s already generating as many “hits” as it did when it had a whole newspaper to give it content. It’s either just breaking even or is perpetually about to, according to which rumors you care to believe. There’s not much further revenue it can attract as a website with banner ads.

PI.com needs to find its next level.

With its current minimal staff, it likely couldn’t create a web app or a mobile app that could command a price from readers, a la Rupert Murdoch’s iPad “paper” The Daily or the newly paywalled NY Times site.

But it could repackage its current in-house content, plus the best of its bloggers’ contributions, into a free web app and/or mobile app.

This would make PI.com’s articles and essays better organized, easier to navigate and to read.

This would also offer advertisers with bigger, more productive ad spaces that would compliment, not clutter up, the reading experience.

Then of course, there’s always the possibility of moving the P-I back into print. Perhaps as a colorful freebie tabloid, one that could siphon off home and car ads from the SeaTimes and lifestyle ads from the slick regional monthlies.

Alternately, some of the local philanthropists who’d offered to take over the P-I from Hearst in 2009 could start their own paper, creating a new tradition.